What is Demand Generation Software?

Demand generation software helps marketing professionals to expand their reach to new markets, stimulate consumer interest, promote new products, create PR buzz, and re-engage existing customers. These solutions can be used for improving conversion optimization and sales cycles. They enable you to create consumer excitement about your product and offers useful tools to help you execute effective marketing strategies. The main purpose of demand generation software is to help marketers build and nurture lead and customer relationships over the long term. Key features of this system include lead generation, lead capture, lead mining, lead intelligence, lead scoring, and predictive analytics. For more information on this category of software, you can peruse our in-depth reviews of the best apps in this group starting with the current topper HubSpot Marketing.

How To Choose The Best Demand Generation Software

Put in a single sentence, demand generation software is a set of comprehensive and advanced online tools for identifying leads before those are actually passed to the nurturing team. What these programs do is to qualify prospects and to separate prospective buyers from ‘casual visitors’, based on their responses, participation in events, user campaigns, and inbound marketing, which is, in fact, the launching process of demand generation.

As such, demand generation platforms help the sales team build a long-term collaboration with the marketing one, and to score conversion in advance, rather than healing the consequences of an unsuccessful one. In fact, demand generation companies allow you to dissolve the traditional marketing concept to such extent that organizations entrust their entire market discovery, product promotion, and PR reengagement exactly to their DG systems.

But how to do knowledgeable comparisons to choose the best demand generation software for small business or enterprises? Let this buyer’s guide lead you there!

Get to know each product with free trial

A good course of action is to sign up for at least a few free trials or demo and starter unpaid plans from popular demand generation software providers. With that method you will have the opportunity to test the important elements and you will get a good comparison of the capabilities of different apps. The best thing to do when choosing the best Demand Generation software for your company is to try the list of services that currently have the highest SmartScore rankings and Customer Satisfaction Rating in our demand generation softwarereviews, such as OSI Affiliate software reviews, LeadSquared, or RapidMiner.

Targeted Businesses

Demand generation software tools are good for any company wishing to increase demand and score leads more efficiently. However, there are a few scenarios in which demand generation software is most needed:

Small Businesses looking to improve targeting efforts. Small teams don’t have the same capacity to collect demographics, pain points, titles, roles, challenges, and customer goals as large companies do. They’re working hard on reducing time and efforts, which is why they need to automate demand generation with a quality program that can meet their unique audience targeting needs.

Medium Businesses looking to improve the quality of their gated content. As the number of customers and interested parties rises, medium companies have less and less time to devote to the quality of their content, and the mistake most of them make is to let this time-inefficiency affect the satisfaction of customers. Thereof, demand generation software is welcomed by mid-size companies, in particular for creating outstanding and branded pieces users can only access with subscription. As you can guess, both sides have something to win from this: the business obtains the customer information, while end-users obtain quality and incentives for their purchase decisions.

Large Businesses looking to communicate the value of their services. This is probably the vast majority of demand generation software buyers, such that already know they can’t rely on impulsive purchases, and that they have to develop specific strategies to trigger their customers’ decision. Large enterprises use demand generation software as their compelling language – the one that tells customers what they’re supposed to do, and how the services of the enterprise can help them do it.

What are Examples of Demand Generation Software?

OSI Affiliate Software: An outstanding tool to set up and manage referral programs, and to boost both the size and quality of a company’s customer database.

LeadSquared: A very comprehensive acquisition solution that drives leads through the sales funnel in a fast and responsive way, and suits the needs of any small/medium business.

Infer: An advanced scoring solution used by marketing teams to focus on promising leads. The system identifies and rates the leads, and gives external behavior signals based on internal data.

ThriveHive: A popular and fast marketing and lead management solution for business owners to develop their guided marketing strategies.

Types of Demand Generation Software

There are many different types of demand generation software, varying from free and basic tool suites to ultra costly and accurate programs. Features can also be categorization criteria, as certain programs do nothing but to collect leads, while others are more robust and they allow marketers to score those leads, to develop purchase incentive strategies, and even do some custom branding. Deployment is also an important factor based on which there are:

On-premise demand generation programs. These are covered with a single license, and are hosted on the client’s local server. They qualify as the most expensive ones, due the fact that they require complex setup and occasionally some hardware installation.

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) demand generation programs. These are usually paid per month, and are hosted on the vendor’s server. The business owner is not responsible for installation, updating, and maintenance.

Cloud-hosted demand generation programs. Most of these offer free basic plans, and qualify as the most affordable ones due to their universal access and the fact that the client doesn’t need to update them or to pay for maintenance.

Key Features of Demand Generation Software

When deciding whether a demand generation system is good for you or not, check whether it aggregates the following features and practices:

Integrated data operations: The system is supposed to distinguish customers according to their behavior, and to provide valuable data for automated marketing decisions.

ROI-centered culture: The system should centralize demand-center operations for the sake of brand awareness and efficient sales.

Channel hierarchies: The system will help building personalized lead profiles for all stages of the sales cycle, in order to understand what they’re thinking and how they’re reacting to your strategy.

Holistic content strategy: Upon creation, content ought to be aligned to the customers’ profiles, and should ideally be generalized to the extent of being usable for many audiences.

Best lead disposition practices: Look for practices such as lead scoring, lead routing, lead capture, lead distribution, lead nurturing, etc.

Benefits of Demand Generation Software

Only in 2015, 70% of all inbound strategies were based on demand generation. The trends, practices, and the applied systems vary significantly, but the purpose is always the same: Demand generators reveal invaluable truths about customer behavior without which conversions cannot be properly filtered.

Is a demand generation system going to help you too? Let’s check:

Streamlined relationships. The best way to ensure your business has credibility on the market is to personalize the relationship you have with your customers. You have to be sincere, value-orientated, and to go straight to the point without wasting their time. A demand generations system makes this more than possible because it builds such relationships on scale. You know which your priority prospects are, and you manage to give each of them the personalized attention they deserve. Instead of looking to tailor your work line according to the market, you will tailor the market according to your system. As simple as that!

Some extra ‘breathing space’ for customers. Nobody likes to be spammed all the time, so it may be the time for you to back up from aggressive sales marketing. You think it may turn customers cold towards your product? Not with a demand generation system. Your demand generation system softens sales and makes you look friendly, helpful, and non-demanding, and that’s what people like when being offered a product. Thanks to it, you will be able to distinguish a group of valuable prospects who’ll be interested in your product even when they can’t afford it, and will almost certainly come back.

Delivering value for customer satisfaction. Instead of observing the digital world from the prism of harsh competitiveness, start considering all the attention-driving opportunities that it can give you. The chance of using demand generators is only one of the many, and it is just precious for building your own audience where people will be so fascinated by your efforts that they won’t even consider a different product. To make things simpler, you’ll reach them before they reach you, and you will offer detailed descriptions, free trials, and live support. Once they actually start trusting your platform, difficult engagement will no longer be an issue.

Things to consider when you invest in a SaaS

First, be clear about the reasons why you wish to use a SaaS product. You should also have a good understanding of your existing infrastructure and business processes. This information will assist you to smoothly integrate the SaaS program with your existing infrastructure without any problems.

The second consideration is a follow up to the first one. Ask yourself what you want the SaaS product to do for your company. Then, be clear about the features the software should have. For instance, if you want improved data collaboration between different business sections you need a platform that can be accessed by multiple users. However, if you need an efficient system that is similar to an on-premise solution, you need to invest in a SaaS software that can be accessed by only a few users at a time.

After you select a suitable provider, do not sign an agreement before you take a good look at the Service Level Agreement (SLA). The SLA will clearly state what the SaaS vendor is offering and the compensation they will pay if they do not deliver the agreed services. Read and understand the SLA thoroughly to recognize what you are getting into and to avoid concerns later.

Similar Categories:

If you couldn't locate specifically the thing you were looking for below is a list of more categories relevant to Demand Generation Software that you might want to explore:

Our Score Read More

Our review platform makes use of our proprietary SmartScore™ algorithm to examine all the solutions in the Demand Generation Software category so that we can help you select the best possible software. It pays attention to the following metrics: cruscial components, collaboration tools, custom elements, integrations with other services, user friendliness, help & support, how secure a software is, support for mobile devices, general media ratings. Currently, HubSpot Marketing is the leader in this category and is recommended by our experts. Following extensive testing it received the best results among its competitors and we strongly suggest that you include it as one of the solutions for your company.

User Satisfaction Read More

A look at overall user satisfaction with the solutions in our Demand Generation Software category based on our unique algorythm that gathers client reviews, comments and opinions across a broad range of social media sites in order to help you make an informed investment decision.

99%

100%

98%

100%

91%

100%

100%

100%

100%

94%

Pricing Read More

Each vendor in the Demand Generation Software category will provide a different group of pricing plans for its service and each plan will include a different group of elements. Below we list the overal pricing for the cheapest package offered for each product. Please note that advanced features may cost extra.

free

by quote

$44

$2,000

by quote

by quote

$149

by quote

by quote

$25

Devices Supported Read More

A summary of what kind of devices and operating systems are supported by all B2B tools in the Demand Generation Software category, including mobile platforms and web-based solutions.

Windows

Android

iPhone/iPad

Mac

Web-based

Laguages Supported Read More

Learn which languages and countries are served by the top B2B solutions in the Demand Generation Software category, including services aimed at international markets and created for multi-cultural teams of employees.

Pricing Model Read More

Examine which pricing models are offered by the vendors in the Demand Generation Software category to see which one matches your business preferences and expenses best. Keep in mind that specific solutions can provide free or freemium accounts for you to test first.

Free

Monthly payment

One-time payment

Annual Subscription

Quote-based

Customer Types Read More

An overview of what kinds of companies a selected B2B service in the Demand Generation Software category aims for, from small businesses and non-profits to big enterprises.

Small Business

Large Enterprises

Medium Business

Freelancers

Deployment Read More

An overview of what types of product deployement are supported by each B2B vendor in the Demand Generation Software category. Even though the majority of modern SaaS solutions are cloud-hosted certain services might offer an on-site deployment model as well.

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FinancesOnline is available for free for all our business professionals interested in an efficient way to find top-notch SaaS solutions. We are able to keep our service free of charge thanks to cooperation with some of the vendors, who are willing to pay us for traffic and sales opportunities provided by our website. Please note, that FinancesOnline lists all vendors, we’re not limited only to the ones that pay us, and all software providers have an equal opportunity to get featured in our rankings and comparisons, win awards, gather user reviews, all in our effort to give you reliable advice that will enable you to make well-informed purchase decisions.